From Builder Basic to Beautiful

Tag Archives: front door

I’m back! I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted (4 month’s!), a lot was going on in outside of home improvements. I was searching for a new job – which any of you who have done this can attest to – is like a full time job in and of itself. So the majority of my free time outside of work was spent looking for new work. Plus it was a frozen tundra in Connecticut pretty much through March which makes me just want to stay inside and hibernate – which we did with the free time we had.

I’m pleased to say we’ve thawed out (it was 80 out this past Saturday!), and I’ve started at a new job. I’m hoping I can get back to posting at a somewhat regular schedule.

Anywhoo, how did you spend your first warm weekend of Spring? I painted our front door… again… Remember when it looked like this:

Yeah… that was a learning experience in choosing paint colors. The yellow lasted through the entire winter of 2013/2014 as I had painted it the last warm weekend of the year. Come Spring 2014 the builder replaced the door and we were back to basic primer white. Well we finally picked out a new color over the winter and it was warm enough to get it done I used the same technique I highlighted here, so here we go…

Still a bright fun color. Here’s a close-up of the completed door:

And a view of the whole house:

So what do you think? Do you like it, is it better than the yellow? I’d love to hear your opinion – love it or hate it! Currently we’re liking it and are looking forward to seeing how it looks once we have some plantings out front.

On the agenda for this spring is having a paver walkway and flower beds installed out front which should bring some additional color and life the yard.

Perhaps the most spectacular fail we’ve made since moving into our house was painting the door yellow. You may recall the house looking like this:

One thing is for sure, if you’ve ever driven down our street you sure couldn’t miss the house. (Not sure if that’s a good thing?) Needless to say it didn’t stand out in a GOOD way. The plan pretty much since the yellow paint was still wet was to repaint. Unfortunately I made this blunder on the last somewhat warm fall day. So we lived with it, all winter.

Spring arrived and I was practically chomping at the bit to repaint, but what color? I didn’t want to choose wrong again. We were also having more and more problems with the door sealing, something we noticed when we first moved in but never had addressed. So we brought it up with the builder who came over with a brand new door.

He took the old door off…

and put in a new door.

When he asked if we had anymore yellow paint, so he could paint it Ken and I pretty unanimously agreed that “We had run out, don’t worry about it, we’ll paint it.” NO MORE BRIGHT YELLOW DOOR.

So now we have this

Back to square one. Now the decisions start, do we want to stick with yellow but something more subdued like this (first photo) or this? Or are we too traumatized from the horror that was the first yellow?

The interior is much more geared towards gray and blue tones so maybe something light blue/teal like this, this or this, or this. There is also the gray option such as this, or this, but is that too ho-hum?

What color to paint the front door? It’s such a big decision it sends the first impression that visitors and passerby’s see of your home. It was such a big decision in fact that when the builder offered to paint the door for us before we closed we couldn’t come to a decision. I even went so far as to PhotoShop different colors onto a picture of the house to help us decide. In the end we decided to live with the house for a while and just had him paint it white.

white house with a white door – how ordinarily boring

close up

After several months we finally came to the consensus that we wanted yellow. It’s such a happy color, how can you come home to a yellow door and not become instantly more upbeat? Now the only question was what kind of yellow?

This was our inspiration that I found our Pinterest. We both loved it. It’s from Beautiful MattersBlog

Inspiration Door

So we went to the paint store and looked at all the options of paint swatches and came to a decision. I was slightly worried it may be on the bright side, but hey it’s only paint and the whole point is to get the door to “POP” right?

So I got to work cleaning the door with some mineral oil to get off any dirt and grime that was on it. (I read this is extremely important in order for the paint to adhere properly.) It turned out to be a LOT dirtier than I could have imagined.

look how dirty!

Then I got ready to start painting – shook up the can to mix the paint properly and popped it open…

the first sign this might not go so well…

It looked awfully bright, but hey the inspo door is bright and you can’t always tell by what the color looks like in the can right? After all there is way more of it concentrated in a small little area and it always looks different once its dry. So I got to painting. Here’s the finished product:

close up

far away

My eyes! MY EYES!!! We couldn’t have possibly picked a color this bright! the swatch must have lied to us…

oh but we did pick it

What were we thinking? I’ll tell you what I’m thinking now, I’m thinking I need a re-do. As its now the end of October and its getting too cold outside in New England I may have to wait until spring. It’s possibly it may grow on me in the next couple of months – stranger things have happened.

The bright yellow on bright white is just too much – the inspiration door is bright yellow on gray which helps tone it down… Rookie mistake! We should have known better!

So what do you think is it too bright or just right? I’d love to hear your opinion!